The internal political situation of Soviet Russia is determined by the fact that here we see for the first time in world history the existence, over the course of a number of years, of only two classes: the proletariat, educated for decades by a very young, but nonetheless contemporary large-scale machine industry, and the petty peasantry, which constitutes an enormous majority of the population.

The large landowners and capitalists in Russia have not disappeared, but they have undergone complete expropriation, have been utterly defeated politically as a class, the remnants of which have hidden themselves among the state functionaries of Soviet power. They have preserved their class organization abroad, as an émigrés, numbering probably from 1